"The Frustration Aggregator"

For the last few weeks, I have been participating in the semi-private beta test of the new, heavily funded by venture capital site, Quora (and if you're like me and cringe with cognitive dissonance every time someone uses a singular verb form with a plural noun, brace yourself). Quora aspires to be a "canonical" (whatever that means) repository of knowledge, which people go to for the answers to all of life's problems. In practice, it seems to be a fairly straightforward cross between Yahoo! Answers and Twitter, with a dash of Wikipedia thrown in for a little Web 2.0 seasoning. As a Quora user, you are expected to posts questions and answer others, presumably in your own areas of expertise. You are able to follow other users, to see what they're posting to the site, but you are also able to follow topics like, "Startups" or "Pizza" or "Restaurants in San Francisco" (while my personal favourite is "Questions That Are Actually Assertions"). Any user is able to add or remove topic tags to any question, edit any question, and suggest edits to other users' answers.

The interesting thing about Quora, for me, is the incredibly skewed demographics of the current userbase. Because it was in a semi-closed, invitation only beta, the vast majority of the users seem to be Silicon Valley people. This means that the site filled with charming Silicon Valley quirks such as:

• A penchant for conveying information in short, bulleted lists.
• Seemingly random usage of bold fonts for emphasis.
• The unique worldview that develops from the combination of being extremely young and fabulously wealthy.

They have turned a small minority of the population, hyperambitious yuppies who feel like their incredible arrogance is justified by their financial success, into a local majority. As a result, they seem to look at me as a kind of retarded alien when I unwittingly trip over their tech startup orthodoxy and offend them. But if you can handle being called a dumb cunt when you imply that denying public education to people of below average intelligence is a disturbing idea, the site is an extremely interesting insight into how this small but influential sector of the western population thinks. Questions like, "What other reasons could be there to create a startup if not to get rich?" and "Why are the working class more authoritarian than other socioeconomic classes?" give some insights into the bizarre, quasilibertarian ideology shared by many of these people, while questions like, "Which parties can I attend that have male attendees with a net worth of $10 million or more?" and "What are the best practices to follow when meeting someone in person for the first time through online dating?" open a hilarious window onto the dating scene among awkward, rich nerds and the beautiful, manipulative women who love them.

In any case, Quora is now open to the public, and it will likely soon be losing its character as the unwashed masses pour in. I would encourage anyone who is interested in it for its anthropological interest to get in there before it's too late. They have not worked out a real way to deal with determined trolls, so I would wager that the site is not going to be in its current form for much longer.